Greenville
Discover Greenville
A concise introduction to Greenville, its geography, history and culture.
Introduction
Greenville is the seat of Darke County in western Ohio, on flat farmland near the Indiana line, and it is where the state of Ohio effectively began. The Treaty of Greenville was signed here in 1795, a year after the battle of Fallen Timbers, ending the Northwest Indian War and ceding most of what is now Ohio to the United States — the boundary it drew ran across the middle of the future state.
The town’s other figure is Annie Oakley, born in Darke County in 1860, who out-shot Frank Butler in a match at fifteen and then married him, spent seventeen years with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, and is buried a few miles north of town. The Garst Museum holds the largest collection of her possessions anywhere, alongside treaty material and a gallery for Lowell Thomas, the broadcaster who made Lawrence of Arabia famous and who also came from here.
Beyond that, Greenville is a working county town with a preserved brick main street, a bakery known for a pastry called the tin roof sundae cake, and the Great Darke County Fair each August — one of the largest county fairs in Ohio and the sort of event the region genuinely organises its year around. KitchenAid mixers have been made in the town since 1946.